UPDATE: Check out our interactive calculator that lets you see how much you’re spending in gas on your daily commute.

I used to spend a lot of time with the kids at the Vancouver Aquarium, especially in the winter months when it wasn’t as busy (I’m more of a Science World fan now). Usually we drove down there but one day it occurred to me that maybe we should take the bus, since there’s a route that goes more or less from our front door all the way down to Stanley Park.

There were pros and cons either way. Taking the bus may be more of an adventure, and better for the planet. But it could be more of a hassle if one of the kids had a meltdown or it started to rain.

And then there was a final consideration: cost. Was it cheaper to take the bus or drive?

I realized I had absolutely no idea.

When we bought our vehicle, I remember paying quite a bit of attention to how fuel efficient it was. Indeed, one of the reasons we went with a Mazda5 instead of a proper minivan was it used a lot less gas. But then, once the car was purchased, I never really thought about fuel efficiency again.

How much gas I use is, of course, based on how much I drive. But, like many people I suspect, I long stopped thinking about it that way. Once a week or so I’ll spend $60, sometimes more, to fill up the car and then I drive it as much as I want. I don’t really think of each kilometre I drive as costing me a little bit more money.

So when it came down to figuring out how much it cost me in gas to drive to Stanley Park and back, I was at a loss.

Luckily, there are ways of figuring this out.

National Resources Canada posts detailed fuel efficiency figures for most makes and models of cars sold in Canada. The ratings can be a bit tough to decipher, as fuel efficiency for each model can differ depending on the type of transmission and size of engine.

But basically what you need do is look for the type of car you own and then look at how many litres of fuel are required to run it. This is expressed in litres per 100km (L/100km) and there’s a figure for both city and highway driving.

Many long trips will be a combination of city and highway driving. To be on the conservative side, I’d use the city figure.

Take that number and multiply it by the cost of gas per litre (currently about $1.30 to $1.40). That will give you the cost of driving 100km (usually somewhere between $10 and $20). If you want to know the figure for a single kilometre, that’s easy, since you just divide by 100. So if the cost of driving 100km is $11, driving one kilometre is 11 cents.

For the Mazda5, the figure for city driving is 9.9L/100km. So here’s the math, at $1.30 a litre:

9.9 x 1.30 = $12.87 (or 12.9 cents a kilometre)

All you have to do now is figure out the distance to wherever you’re going to. Just load up Google Maps and type in the directions to get the distance. Then remember to multiply by two (since you want to come back home after).

Going from east Vancouver to Stanley Park works out to about 26 kilometres round trip. So much does that trip cost in gas?

26 x $0.129 = $3.35

A one-zone fare on TransLink is $5 round trip (kids under five are free). So it’s actually cheaper for me to drive than to take the bus. However, parking in the park for a couple hours is $6, bringing the total cost of driving to the aquarium $9.35, making transit the cheaper option.

I also realize that gas and parking are far from the only cost of owning a car. There’s the cost of buying it, repairs, annual depreciation and auto insurance, just to name a few.

But those are more likely to be factors in deciding whether to own a car at all, or whether to own a second vehicle, and aren’t as relevant for someone in my situation: The car is already purchased, insured and sitting in the driveway. The added cost to driving a few more kilometres is mainly just gas (and maybe a couple cents of added wear and tear for each kilometre).

I made up the graphic using Tableau Public showing the cost of driving 100km in several different types of vehicles. In deciding which ones to include on the list, I looked at a list of the best-selling cars in Canada, then — given the readership of this blog — also added a bunch of different minivan models.

It looks kind of grainy here. Click on it to get a better, full-size look.

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